It also means Shoemaker can look towards building off his successful 2016 season and provide great value for fantasy baseball owners. His average draft position (ADP) in NFBC drafts is 227, meaning he is getting taken around the 18th round of 12-team drafts.

This is considerably later than Price (ADP of 48.99), Martinez (68.08) and Quintana (108.05). While these guys will almost surely be more productive than Shoemaker if they're healthy, it’s worth questioning whether the gap in ADP is warranted.

If Shoemaker duplicates his performance last season, he will be one of fantasy baseball’s best values. But can he make it happen?

Ball in Play Regression

Shoemaker’s ERA- in 2016 was 97, suggesting his performance was just slightly above average after park and league adjustments. However, his FIP- of 85 was tied for 16th in the majors among those who threw at least 160 innings.

The gap between the two numbers can mostly be chalked up to his .315 BABIP allowed. It’s hard to be concerned about this number, even after setting aside the inherent volatility of balls in play.

In his first two big league seasons, Shoemaker didn't produce a BABIP higher than .286. So, his 2016 number was a bit of an outlier in the opposite direction. Prior to last year, his career soft-contact rate was 16.1%, while his hard-contact rate was 31.1%, according to FanGraphs.

But last season, his soft-contact rate increased to 17.4% and his hard-contact rate fell to 30.1%. While his line-drive rate went up to about 24% from a previous average of 19.1%, his infield-fly rate also increased from 7.1% to 13.2%. Only 10 pitchers threw at least as many innings as Shoemaker and generated infield flies more often.

In terms of exit velocity, he was at 88.5 miles per hour last year and 87.6 miles per hour in 2015. According to xstats.org, after taking factors including exit velocity and launch angle into consideration, he “should have” allowed a BABIP of .300 last season, which further supports the theory he was a bit unlucky (luck may have played less of a role in his prior ball in play success, as his xBABIP in 2015 was .285).

The combination of these numbers should make us confident his BABIP will regress to the mean in 2017, so he'll just need to master the “three true outcomes” again to be a top-tier run preventer.

To do so, he will need to answer two questions affirmatively.

Can He Get the Strikeouts Back?

Walks have never been a problem for Shoemaker, who has only issued a free pass to 5.1% of the batters in his career. It was even better last year, when he brought his walk rate down to 4.5%.

His relationship with strikeouts and home runs has been a bit more complicated, though.

In his first full big league season in 2014, Shoemaker struck out 22.8% of batters he faced, but this dipped to 20.4% the following season (a decline in the whiff rate on his curveball may have been part of the reason why; he has virtually scrapped the pitch since).

His strikeout rate dipped back to 17.7% from July through the end of the season, and as Davidson notes, this might have been due to decreasing usage and effectiveness from his slider (rather than the league adjusting to his splitter, which remained effective in this final stretch of the season).

His release point on his slider stayed consistent, and Davidson hypothesizes that the diminishing effectiveness of his slider was due to how the pitch was leaving his hand. If he can get this sorted out, it's possible we could see Shoemaker get close to fanning batters at the rate he did in May and June.

Even if he can’t, his FIP was still really good thanks to his elite walk rate and strong 1.01 home runs per nine innings rate (the league average was about 1.2).

A low home-run-to-fly-ball rate (HR/FB%) was the reason why; his HR/FB% was just 10.3%, below his previous career average of 11.7% and the big league average of 12.8%. His xFIP- was 91, implying that his FIP- would have been six points worse had he been at the league average in this department.

Per xStats.org, he “should have” allowed about 23 home runs, while he actually gave up 18. This would have translated to a 13.2% homer-to-fly-ball rate average, 1.3 homers per nine and a 3.92 FIP.

While the FIP would still have been above the league average, it would also be closer to the middle of the pack. This is about what the projection models forecast for Shoemaker in 2017. Our projections, plus Steamer, ZiPS and PECOTA project Shoemaker to post ERAs of 3.88, 3.84, 3.81 and 3.86, respectively (the four models peg his home run per nine rate between 1.11 and 1.21).